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Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski Christian Memories of the Maccabean Martyrs New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2009 Pp. xii + 250. $79.95.
A scholar of Jewish-Christian relations, Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski bears a heavy moral burden in this study of 2 Maccabees 7 and 4 Maccabees. "[T]he question of ethically remembering Christian traditions of the Maccabean martyrs intersects with the question of how the historian ought to confront the ethical burden of patterns of Christian violence against Jews over the ages that culminated in the Holocaust" (173). In other words, a necessary, though insufficient, root of the Shoah springs from early Christian attitudes toward Jews, which "propagated violence, both physical and ideological" (173). Using linguistic, postmodern, and postcolonial theories, as well as memory studies, Joslyn-Siemiatkoski illuminates how Christian patterns of thought suborned and "colonized" Jews in key eras: the age of the martyrs, imperial Christianity, the Carolingian Empire, the Investiture Controversy and reform, the Crusades, including Jewish views of the Maccabean martyrs after the Rhineland massacres of 1096, the cult of the Maccabean martyrs in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Cologne, ending with brief examples of how humanists dealt with the Maccabees.
While memory of the Maccabean martyrs is malleable, reflecting local historical conditions, Joslyn-Siemiatkoski identifies the core Christian teaching of "supersessionism" as the central problem. Supersessionism is a "phrase regime" of the "differend," which,...